Commercial pollination
Renting colonies to growers for the duration of a bloom, under contract, at a price per hive. For many large operations it is now the main revenue line and honey is the by-product.
Current status
Widespread living practice
Practised across a substantial area by many communities, and currently documented.
A large and currently documented sector, reported annually in government agricultural statistics and in industry acreage and demand figures.
The contract is the product
A pollination agreement specifies the number of colonies, a delivery and removal window, a density per hectare, and — critically — a colony strength, usually expressed as frames of bees and verified by inspection. A weak colony forages less, so strength is what the grower is actually buying.
That is a different business from selling honey. Revenue is contracted in advance rather than set by a commodity market, it is paid by an agricultural buyer rather than a packer, and the beekeeper's operational year is organised around bloom dates.
Which crops, and why it varies so much
Crop dependence on animal pollination varies from essentially total to none. The published crop-by-crop assessment underlying most later work classifies leading crops by how much production is attributable to animal pollinators, and the headline finding is worth carrying: the cereals that supply most of the world's calories do not depend on animal pollination at all, while a large number of fruit, nut, vegetable and oilseed crops do, to varying degrees.
So paid pollination concentrates where dependence is high, acreage is large, bloom is short and wild pollinators are insufficient — almonds being the extreme case on all four counts.
What the beekeeper is exposed to
- Colony losses over winter, which determine whether contracts can be filled at all.
- Pesticide exposure on and around the crop, which is a contractual and practical issue as well as a biological one.
- Transport cost and fuel price, which move independently of the pollination fee.
- Concentration risk — many operations' colonies in one place, sharing whatever any of them brought.
- The fee itself, which is a negotiated market price and varies by crop, region and year rather than being a fixed rate.
Cultural significance
The economic inversion that made managed colony numbers a function of crop acreage. It is the main reason a honey site has to talk about almonds.
What this page does not claim
That honey bees do most of the world's pollination, or that paid pollination reflects the total value of pollinators. Wild pollinators contribute substantially and are unpaid; the fee is a market price for a service, not a measure of ecological worth.
In short
- Colony strength, not colony count, is what a grower is buying.
- Cereals need no animal pollination; dependence is concentrated in fruit, nut and oilseed crops.
- Fees are negotiated market prices that move yearly — quote them with a date or not at all.
Sources
- Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops — Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2007) · Peer-reviewed article
- Honey (annual report) — United States Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service · Government statistics
- Almond industry pollination and acreage reporting — Almond Board of California · Industry body
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.